Kris instantly recoiled, as if burned. He sprang back from Mia, his entire body stiffening. The vulnerability vanished, replaced by a furious flush and an immediate, almost frantic, reconstruction of his walls. His face hardened, his jaw clenching. Mia instinctively flinched, a hot flush spreading across her face as well. The fragile, revealing moment, the connection they had just shared, shattered into a million pieces under the harsh light of the interruption.
"No, James," Mia said quickly, stepping further away from Kris, forcing a smile she didn't feel. Her voice was too bright, too strained. "Just... debriefing. The bet's over. And Kris was just... thanking me for my 'admirable duties.'" The words felt hollow, a desperate, pathetic attempt to restore normalcy to a situation that was anything but.
Kris merely folded his arms across his chest, his face unreadable, a cold mask descending. But his eyes, when they met James's, held a chilling intensity, a silent, furious warning. The unspoken challenge from Day Four and Five was back, undeniable, but now laced with a raw, almost predatory anger. James, sensing the dangerous shift, wisely said nothing more, though his worried gaze lingered on Mia.
Mia felt like she was suffocating. The intimacy, the vulnerability, the sudden, jarring interruption – it was all too much. She needed to escape. "Well, I should... I should go," she mumbled, grabbing her bag and practically bolting for the door. She didn't look back at Kris, not wanting to see the unreadable anger in his eyes, not wanting to acknowledge the confusing, overwhelming emotions swirling inside her.
She walked out into the cool evening air, leaving behind the warmth of Kris's momentary vulnerability and the shattered fragments of a moment that had irrevocably changed everything. Day seven had ended not with answers, but with a torrent of new questions, leaving Mia adrift in a sea of confusing emotions, the boundary between performance and reality more indistinct than ever. Her mind reeled from the raw honesty and unexpected intimacy of Kris's confession, the jarring abruptness of James's arrival, and the unsettling realization that the week-long bet had irrevocably entangled her with Kris Windsor in a way she never could have predicted.